Holmes: Mass. GOP says this time it’s different

Sunday

Jun 1, 2014 at 12:01 AMJun 14, 2014 at 11:31 AM

By Rick HolmesOpinion editor

The old story of the Massachusetts Republican Party is written in the record: No Republicans hold statewide office or represent the state in Congress. Democrats have controlled both houses of the state Legislature since 1959.This year will be different, say the leaders of the Mass. GOP, and it would certainly be newsworthy if they can overcome any of the multiple factors behind that legacy of defeat.Those factors stretch from the Berkshires to Boston to Washington. The national GOP wrote off Massachusetts long ago. National money sometimes flows to a marquee candidate like Scott Brown or Mitt Romney, but not to the state party organization. Tight budgets and uphill prospects make it hard for the Republicans to recruit top candidates and campaign staff.It's long been a pretty shallow talent pool at party headquarters, one GOP insider told me. Out of that pool have come some smart-alecks who confuse the electorate with the audience for conservative talk radio. They've run campaigns that were nastier than their candidates, and turned to stunts – picketers dressed like convicts marching outside Deval Patrick's Milton home, war whoops and tomahawk chops outside Elizabeth Warren rallies - that backfired.Unable to field or fund a full slate of candidates, the party has settled for a "win just one" strategy, focusing all its resources on winning the governor's race or, in Brown's case, a Senate seat. That left "down-ticket" Republicans begging for money and attention, while the top candidate's organization, not the party, ran the show.Even when the "win just one" strategy worked, it's been "one-and-done" for the winners, who left the state behind – Bill Weld for New York, Paul Cellucci for Canada, Romney for one of his other homes and now Brown for New Hampshire – and left the state GOP as weak as ever.Operationally, the state party has never had a ground game. There are wide swaths of Western Massachusetts where you can't find a Republican town committee, one Republican told me. Brian Wynne, who is heading a new statewide organizing effort for the party, said he found boxes with information on 15,000 voters collected by volunteers knocking on doors for Brown's 2012 campaign. Nobody had bothered to put the data into the computer.This year it will be different, Wynne told a recent gathering of Republicans. The party already has 18 field offices open, twice as many as the Brown campaign had on Election Day. His team has recruited 300 town and precinct captains, and has a new database system."We're targeting voters at a new level we've never done before," he said.Party Chair Kirsten Hughes told the gathering of MetroWest GOP activists – which itself was something of an innovation – that she's excited that Republicans have a full slate of candidates for statewide office. Other than the one at the top of the ticket, none are household names, but none are embarrassments either.At the top of the ticket is Charlie Baker, and he, too, says this year will be different.Baker lost to Patrick four years ago. His "Had Enough?" campaign had some of the smart-aleck edge that marked other GOP efforts, along with customary tough-guy Republican promises to roll back taxes and lay off government workers.This time Baker has hired new advisers, most of them from out-of-state. They include Will Keyser, who was a top communications aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy and former U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan. Baker has dropped the no-taxes pledge and the combative stance.His friends didn't recognize the candidate who ran in 2010, Baker said as he opened his new campaign. This time he'll be himself, "that goofy family guy, that really enthusiastic, hard-charging, set-the-bar-high, let's-go-get-it-type leader." He'll listen more, and showcase his family and his moderate views. To mark the 10th anniversary of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, Baker released a video featuring his brother recalling how supportive Charlie was when he came out of the closet.The party's convention in March showed some familiar pitfalls. The GOP's best prospect to break into the Congressional delegation, Richard Tisei, boycotted the convention because the party platform was stridently pro-life and anti-marriage equality. After the convention, controversy erupted over whether party officials had miscounted the ballots to keep Mark Fisher, a tea party candidate, from challenging Baker in the primary, and whether party leaders tried to bribe Fisher to go away.So, will this year be different? Without the popular Patrick on the ballot, Republicans have a real shot at winning one race, and maybe this is the year they start building a real grassroots organization. But no one's ever gone broke betting against the Massachusetts Republican Party.Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. (http://blogs.wickedlocal.com/holmesandco). He can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.